Tag Archives: behavioural advertising

As a transformation strategist one of the biggest challenges I come across every week is getting planners and brand managers to shift from thinking like a brand to thinking like their intended audience. Too many briefs I see only have demographic customer profiles, which fall short when you’re planning for a digitally connected world.

To shift from broadcast to joined up storytelling, just knowing characteristics like; gender, age, marital status, geographic location, socio-economic status and so on simply isn’t enough and to make assumptions is lazy and will frankly lower your ROI.

I’m encouraging inclusion of behavioral insights, or customer modeling as it’s also known, into all the briefs and plans we’re creating with clients and here’s why:

1. Nearly every digital marketing touch-point is intended to invoke an action
2. An action is more likely to be taken if encouraged in a relevant way at the right time in a customer journey
3. A customer journey is made up of a customer behaving in a certain way
4. These behaviors are encouraged by a certain mindset at each touch-point
5. These mindsets are triggered by insights both implicit and explicit
6. Understanding what those insights are better enable us to invoke the intended action

Simple really.

Demographic profiling gives you just enough to paint picture of a typical persona in a hypothetical group of people. Behavioral profiling will give you a much higher chance of success because it’s a stronger predictor of what your relationship can be because it’s action orientated.

If you want to know more, I recommend this book; Misbehaving, written by Richard H.Thaler who pretty much invented the field of behavioral economics. It’s insightful and tells a great story. Not surprising when you think about it.

Behavioural advertising or targeting is a much discussed subject (often closely followed by the online privacy topic) and one that brings with it an equal balance of aggression and nervousness.

Put simply behavioural targeting is a technique used online to deliver specific messages based on user trends. Information is collected by cookies (not the choc chip kind) on users’ computers based on what they’re searching for and looking at, then this information is profiled and collated into ‘user groups’.

By understanding these user groups we can more effectively target audiences online therefore deliver more relevant adverts.

Contrary to popular belief, it is safe and is really just designed to not waste consumer’s time. Big Brother aren’t recording your every move and sending it to MI5 and it is closely regulated by bodies such as the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau).